This telescopic close-up shows off the otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410 in striking false-colors. It also features two remarkable inhabitants of the cosmic pond of gas and dust below and right of center, the tadpoles of IC 410. The picture is a composite of images taken through narrow band filters. The narrow band image data traces atoms in the nebula, with emission from sulfur atoms in red, hydrogen atoms in green, and oxygen in blue. Partly obscured by foreground dust, the nebula itself surrounds NGC 1893, a young galactic cluster of stars that energizes the glowing gas. Composed of denser cooler gas and dust the tadpoles are around 10 light-years long, potentially sites of ongoing star formation. Sculpted by wind and radiation from the cluster stars, their tails trail away from the cluster’s central region. IC 410 lies some 12,000 light-years away, toward the constellation Auriga.

This colorized composite image from NASA’s Dawn mission shows the crater Antonia, which lies in the enormous Rheasilvia basin in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta. The area lies around 58 degrees south latitude. Antonia has a diameter of 11 miles (17 kilometers).

The image was taken by Dawn’s framing camera from September to October 2011.

The light blue material is fine-grain material excavated from the lower crust. The southern edge of the crater was buried by coarser material shortly after the crater formed. The dark blue of the southern crater rim is due to shadowing of the blocky material.

The composite image was created by assigning ratios of color information collected from several color filters in visible light and near-infrared light to maximize subtle differences in lithology (the physical characteristics of rock units, such as color, texture and composition). The color scheme pays special attention to the iron-rich mineral pyroxene.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR and NASA.

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A long and complex strand of plasma hanging above the Sun’s surface erupted (Jan. 31, 2013) as a long loop that stretched and broke apart as it burst into space. Much of the material actually fell back into Sun unable to break free of the Sun’s gravity. The images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) were taken in a wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light (304 Angstroms). The movie covers about six hours of activity. We called it a ‘dragon tail filament’ because before it erupted, it did resemble one. Plasma is a hot gas composed of electrically charged hydrogen and helium.
Another version shown below combines the 304 Angstrom wavelength with the 193 Angstrom, which offers better detail of the motions of the filament before it breaks away.

A solar prominence arched up and then erupted out from near the Sun’s surface (Jan. 23, 2013). SDO observed the event, also associated with a coronal mass ejection, in extreme ultraviolet light as it evolved over seven hours. The strand of solar plasma appeared to perform a somersault as it expanded and disappeared into space. The disruption to the magnetic fields in the area generated the coiling and spreading wave-like action below the site of the event. Solar prominences are unstable clouds of cooler gases suspended above the Sun’s surface by magnetic forces

This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 34 on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken on January 3, 2013 from 11:43:46 to 15:49:31 GMT, on a pass from northwestern Australia, making two complete orbits to eastern Quebec, near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This fast-paced video features the ISS completing two and a half orbits around the Earth, crossing the terminator line several times in the process. The video begins as the ISS is in darkness, and as the moon rises on the left side of the video, the ISS begins to pass over into daylight. Clouds mostly obscure the view during this first daylight pass with the exception of the Caucasus and Elburz Mountains just before the terminator. The ISS slips back into night as the moon again rises in the left side of the video. As the Station flies back into daylight, the ISS flies over Central America, the Caribbean Sea, and Cuba and Florida before flying over the northern Atlantic Ocean. Most of Western Europe is under cloud, and the first land that can be seen is the Alps Mountains and Croatia. The ISS then passes over the terminator line again into darkness as the moon rises in the left side of the video. As the ISS passes back over into daylight, clouds obscure most of the Earth until near the end of the video, when it passes over the Baja Peninsula and the southwestern United States.

Our goal is to create a community of people bent on together advancing our understanding of the universe; a community of people who are participating in doing science, who can explain why what they do matters, and what questions they are helping to answer. We want to create a community, and here is where we invite all of you to be a part of what we’re doing.

There are lots of ways to get involved: You can contribute to science, take a class, join a conversation, or just help us spread the word by sharing about us on social media sites.

Like every community, we are constantly changing to reflect our members. This website will constantly be growing and adding new features. Overtime, we’re going to bring together all the components of a research learning environment (aka grad school), from content in the form of classes, resources, and a blog, to research in the form of citizen science, to social engagement through a forum, social media, and real world activities.

LRO data is used in Moon Mappers

The science you have the chance to help with is being developed by scientists all over the world. We are partnering directly with NASA missions to develop citizen science projects that help expand what science they can accomplish. We’re working with Mercury MESSENGER, the Dawn Mission, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons, and the Space Telescope Science Institute to build a series of projects that map the surfaces of rocky worlds and explore the atmospheres of planets and small bodies the solar system over.

You don’t have to be a genius with a PhD to do science. We provide tutorials with every project that should make it possible for anyone to contribute. We also offer a variety of educational programs so that you can learn as much as you want about the science you’re aiding. We also want teachers and amateurs doing EPO to receive the professional development they need to use CosmoQuest to teach astronomy to students and the public. To help us reach these goals, we’re partnering with the Galileo Teacher Training Program and Astronomers without Borders – one of our goals is to reach out to amateurs and get them the materials and training needed to use CosmoQuest in their outreach.

The cluster is dominated by hot blue and extremely luminous stars that have formed within the last 100 million years. Dust that forms a faint reflection nebulosity around the brightest stars was thought at first to be left over from the formation of the cluster (hence the alternate name Maia Nebula after the star Maia), but is now known to be an unrelated dust cloud in the interstellar medium that the stars are currently passing through. Astronomers estimate that the cluster will survive for about another 250 million years, after which it will disperse due to gravitational interactions with its galactic neighborhood.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, NASA personnel, and others, participate in a wreath laying ceremony as part of NASA’s Day of Remembrance, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012, at Arlington National Cemetery. Wreathes were laid in memory of those men and women who lost their lives in the quest for space exploration.